“Good sermon,” the churchgoer mumbles every Sunday, shaking the pastor’s hand as she leaves the sanctuary. The pastor wonders, Does she mean it?
We wondered, too. We wondered how eager congregations are for change in a time when communication is changing rapidly and dramatically.
We wondered how pastors go about their task, and whether the preaching moment is all they hope it will be. So we asked pastors and the people who listen to them to talk to us about preaching.
Our nationwide survey of 206 pastors and 2,233 church attenders was conducted in February by the research department at Christianity Today International.
Some of the results are unexpected. Listeners are satisfied with what they hear. Their pastors are good communicators, listeners say, but our survey indicates the people don’t always get the message the pastors intend. And on some issues, the view from the pew is very different from the pastor’s perspective.
We asked several noted preachers (pictured below) who are also teachers and lifelong students of communication to help us understand the results.
Here is what we discovered.
1. Pastors are harder on their preaching than their listeners are.
Listeners gave their pastors high marks. Only 6 percent rated their pastor fair or poor, while 57 percent said excellent. These grades held up even when comparing their pastor to preachers in other services they’ve attended. That’s important, according to Haddon Robinson, preaching professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. “The parish concept is dead. People join a church because of the pastor,” Robinson said. “Those who like his preaching stay, and those who don’t go to the church down the street.” In effect, we may be hearing from satisfied customers who, in an era of many church choices, have found what they like.
Churchgoers are satisfied, according to James Earl Massey, because the quality of preaching has improved. Massey is dean emeritus of Anderson University School of Theology in Anderson, Indiana, and former pastor of Metropolitan Church in Detroit. “The tide is rising. Where once we had a generation marked by just a few pulpit giants, today all our ministers are better educated, have greater resources, and are simply better preachers.”
Both preachers and listeners surveyed agreed that the sermons were encouraging, interesting, and compassionate, but beyond that their perspectives differed. Listeners chose the terms clear and convicting, while preachers saw themselves as energetic and conversational. Massey attributes the difference, in part, to each person’s concern with his or her own goals. The listener wants comfort and direction. The preacher wants to communicate well.
Warren Wiersbe, former pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago and teacher on “Back to the Bible,” agreed. “The congregation is thinking I need healing, and the preacher enters the pulpit thinking professionally. He’s like a surgeon in the operating room. The surgeon would say to his colleagues as they’re washing down, ‘Textbook surgery.’ He’s thinking about his technique. The patient would wake up and say, ‘I feel much better.’ He’s thinking about his pain.”
Now retired, Wiersbe often views preaching from the pew. “Some of the sermons that have moved me greatly would not be considered great preaching. I don’t care if the (preacher) stumbles. If he says something that really touches my heart and gives me the strength I need for the week, I’m happy.”
2. Listeners aren’t preachers, but preachers must be listeners.
Pastors want to know if the sermon is hitting home, if people really understand. Listeners said they get the message, but the differing responses on the pastor’s themes for the previous year indicate that what’s said isn’t always what’s heard. When asked, “What major themes were preached last year?” considerably fewer listeners than pastors said sermons were about “handling personal life issues.”
“I can see why there’s a tendency for people to say, ‘He never spoke to my problem,'” Robinson said. “The pastor, like a hovercraft, floats over a lot of issues and believes he’s talking to them, but he doesn’t address them directly.”
The missing component is specificity. Robinson recommended applying the scriptural principles to several different life situations. “People will say, ‘He really gets down where we are.'”
Pastors fear offending church members, said Calvin Miller of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham. “We preachers are more courageous in our minds than in what we are saying. The genius of application is in the courage to say exactly what you mean and not be afraid of offending anyone.”
We found some areas where listeners were willing to risk having their toes stepped on. Application of Scripture to their lives was one. Time was another.
The length of the sermon is important to some people, but not nearly as important as we thought. In fact, pastors are more worried about pleasing parishioners than parishioners are concerned about getting out on time—63 percent of pastors said they should trim their sermons to congregational expectations, but only 39 percent of listeners expected it.
Church attenders may recognize what Miller calls the bigger question: Is God in charge? “(They want to know) is he really bringing revival on these people? When that begins to occur, sermon length doesn’t matter much. In fact, services get longer, because something bigger is happening.”
Bryan Chapell, president of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, calls the 30-minute sermon “the evangelical standard.” Our survey backed him up. Confirming that they were describing the same experience, both pastors and listeners reported sermon lengths that averaged 31.1 minutes. Just over one-third were more than 35 minutes.
Congregations grow accustomed to their preacher’s habits, including sermon length. “Exegete the culture and the text,” Chapell said. “See what their tolerances are. Make decisions based on what you are trying to accomplish and on the capacity of the people to whom you are speaking.”
The 11 percent of listeners who wanted shorter sermons reported an average length of 37.2 minutes. For those who believe the length is fine as it is, their pastors’ sermons averaged 30.3 minutes.
3. Preaching improvement must be self-motivated.
If the congregation is generally satisfied with what it hears on Sunday, then it will be up to the pastor to better his pulpit performance. Few in the congregation have the expertise to judge the technical aspects of preaching, and pastors may have too few points of reference to make adequate comparisons.
The two groups showed the greatest differences of opinion when asked how the sermon could be improved. Pastors were conscious of public speaking techniques and trends in communication; listeners generally were not.
Asked from whom they take their cues in preaching style, 66 percent said preachers I know and 53 percent cited preaching classes or books. Fewer than one-fourth said they looked to preachers on radio or TV and almost none cited other media personalities. Still, 46 percent called their preaching conversational, a description not often used before the TV age.
“Preaching is moving to a more conversational form, a more narrative form,” in Robinson’s view. “TV is reflected in the style of the leading preachers who in turn influence those who follow. Preachers are more influenced by media than we realize.” Robinson cited the desire most pastors have to appear to be preaching without notes (even though 95 percent use some kind of notes according to our survey.)
Blame it on the TelePrompTer. “For every 30-minute sermon the pastor preaches, the people invite Dan Rather into their homes five times,” Miller said. “It’s difficult to match that.”
Massey says, don’t try. “Pastors should note what makes television so attractive to people, but the glamour of it doesn’t bless the church. There’s simplicity in preaching that being a television personality doesn’t honor.”
If exposure to media has changed expectations for communication, our study showed the pastors are not likely to hear so from their people. Only about half of the pastors we polled have an intentional ongoing review of their preaching in place. Of that half, only 34 percent include church members in the process. Pastors are more likely to ask a spouse’s opinion (61 percent) or self-diagnose (56 percent regularly listen to tapes of their sermons).
One question we asked could indicate the listeners’ extreme satisfaction with sermon delivery. More likely it shows who’s actually in touch with sermon trends and technique. Pastors were much more likely to think that more illustrations, more narrative elements, and a more commanding presence in the pulpit would make their sermons more effective. Listeners were unmoved. Robinson said, “The survey says listeners know what they like. I think they like what they know.”
That the listeners are largely unaware of technique may be a good thing. Wiersbe contended, “The ideal sermon is one where people come up afterward and say, ‘You know, I could have done that.'”
4. The future is now, for some.
Listeners showed little desire for their pastors to employ multimedia in sermon delivery. As expected, interest in video projector and computer-enhanced sermons was higher among younger church attenders, with 29 percent of those under 40 in favor of more usage. Better educated listeners were also more open to innovation. Video elements were favored by 37 percent of those listeners with a master’s degree. But overall, only 20 percent of listeners said sermons would be improved by such additions. Response was similar for all visual and dramatic elements: more than twice as many preachers as listeners wanted media used to augment sermons.
“Pastors are trying anything to attract the next generation,” said Marguerite Shuster, pastor and preaching professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. “I’m for the use of various enhancements, on an occasional basis and for specific purposes. But these technologies are head trips rather than anything that is likely to engage a person at the motivational level. It teaches preachers that if they can just get information up on the board, they don’t have to worry about the skill of their composition, the skill of their rhetoric.” Shuster warned, “The power of personal address—God’s address coming through the preacher—is lost.”
Others agreed. Calvin Miller said, “A measurable rapport, where the audience actually leans toward the communicator, depends on an undivided attention. If you have them looking at a bulletin and a screen, you lose their attention to the speaker to some degree.”
If a Powerpoint outline is directed to the head, then drama and movie clips are aimed at the heart. Both miss their mark, in Chapell’s estimation. “If you are really going to move people at the level of their will, you’ve got to get away from the media presentation. I hear people—not preachers, people—say, ‘We are saturated, drowning in media overload. Sometimes we want to go to church where we can sit in a quiet place and hear from God.'”
Chapell said the fascination with media in worship is a “passing fad.” But for now, most preachers want a video projector they can plug into their computer and a drop-down screen over the pulpit.
5. Staff size affects the pastor’s perspective and sermon preparation.
Solo pastors stood out in a couple of areas: they were not as likely to have planned their sermon schedule in advance, and they were significantly less optimistic about the long-term effect of their preaching.
Asked, “Compared to the time when you first started preaching, how do you feel today about the power of your preaching to change lives?” 95 percent of pastors with full-time ministerial staff responded more hopeful. Only 74 percent of solo pastors said they were more hopeful.
Time may be a factor—Wiersbe pointed out that the solo pastor is always on call. Wiersbe said the size of his staff at the Moody Church forced him to plan ahead. Solo pastors may not plan as far in advance because they don’t have as many people coordinating services and programs with their preaching themes. But the issue may not be how the solo pastor spends his or her time, but with whom.
“Solo pastors have more immediate contact with the sheep, and sheep bite,” observed Robinson. “Pastors with staff are shielded from a lot of the trivia of a church—Aunt Maude doesn’t like praise choruses or Uncle Joe is disgruntled. The solo pastor is more likely to deal with the sick sheep than the well sheep.”
Wiersbe concurred. “Those who have staff get better reports. Who does the pastor ask, ‘How am I doing?’ If he asks the elders, the ones who like him are going to say, ‘You’re doing fine, Pastor; we love you.’ The ones who don’t like him won’t say anything. My staff was always honest with me.”
Pastors with staff were much more likely to employ sermon evaluation. Pastors with part-time staff topped out at 70 percent, but only 43 percent of solo pastors reported systematic critique.
“If (pastoral staff) really are a team, then they have an advantage,” Miller concluded.
“Those who have staff are more likely to focus on follow-up than on what happened on Sunday,” Massey said. He warned the solo pastor against concentrating on his preaching as the defining event of the week. Ministry that results from the sermon is more important than the sermon itself. The task for the solo pastor is to create a team with his volunteer leaders that will put the message into action.
6. Some things get better with age.
Finally, how does age affect the preaching moment? Given the current emphasis on the needs and tastes of younger listeners, we investigated whether there are noticable differences between younger and older listeners. Two trends surfaced: older listeners more readily accept the authority of the message, especially if the messenger has been their pastor for a long time, and older preachers are more comfortable with the task.
In our list of 14 words used to describe their pastor’s preaching, authoritative was ranked fifth by listeners age 55 and older but fell to ninth among listeners under 40. Almost half of listeners (48 percent) ascribed authority to the sermons of pastors they had heard more than 15 years, but for those they’ve heard a shorter time, the percentage was 29.
Massey senses a different attitude toward the sermon among younger church attenders, one that may represent a shift in the culture away from acceptance of objective authority. Younger listeners more intentionally filter what they hear through their own experiences. Older listeners are more ready to take Scripture at face value.
Still, the younger pastor is at a disadvantage, Robinson said. “The congregation says, ‘It’s hard to believe that this kid can teach me anything.’ Respect comes with age. People sort of assume you’re doing it right.”
While the congregation grows comfortable with their pastor over time, the pastors grow more assured.
“When you’re younger, you’re always wondering if you’re getting it right—in theology, homiletics, communication,” Robinson said. Our survey shows that older preachers don’t seem to worry so much. Before the sermon, 81 percent of older preachers (age 55 and over) described themselves as motivated and 52 percent were confident. Younger preachers (age 40 and under) register motivation at 61 percent and confidence at 39 percent. Younger preachers were more anxious than older preachers, 39 percent to 19 percent.
Two-thirds of younger pastors found the preaching event draining while two-thirds of older preachers called it fulfilling. And while four in ten younger preachers replayed the sermon in their minds afterward, only one in ten of the long-term pastors relived the moment.
“Older preachers have less emotional attachment to their words,” Miller observed. He finds encouragement in that. “They’ve preached a lot of sermons so they don’t think every sermon has to be a world-changing event. They no longer have to play the prophet. They can state the truth and not get all bothered by it. When they finish the sermon, there will still be hands to shake and babies to kiss at the door.”
— Eric Reed is associate editor of LEADERSHIP.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
